North Korea Agrees to Talks on Reunions of Families

North Korea agreed on Thursday to hold talks over reunions of families separated by the Korean War at the South’s preferred location, the latest baby step forward in a period of rapprochement between the two nations.

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This file photo taken in 2010 shows North Koreans on a bus waving to their South Korean relatives as they bid farewell following their three-day separated family reunion meeting at the North’s Mt. Kumgang resort.

The talks will take place on Friday at the border village of Panmunjom. An agreement to proceed with the reunions would lead to the first such event since 2010.

Following a recent tentative agreement to restart their shared industrial zone, the move to try and find a way to bring together relatives from each side marks further progress in inter-Korean relations. But in its acceptance of the South’s suggested location for the latest talks, Pyongyang once again made clear its strong desire to get another lucrative inter-Korean project back up and running: the Mt. Kumgang resort on the North’s east coast.

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Mt. Kumgang was the North’s preferred location for the talks about reunions, which it wanted to happen alongside discussions about resuming tours to the mountain resort. Seoul has insisted on keeping the two issues separate.

In its message to the South on Thursday, the North said it hoped that working-level talks on resuming Kumgang tours–suspended for five years–would open “as soon as possible.” It called for those talks to be held in late August or early September, earlier than Sept. 25 offered by the South last week.

Analysts say the North’s determination to push ahead with talks over Mt. Kumgang reflects its value as another cash cow for the regime, and–in contrast with the Kaesong complex–a smaller risk of destabilization of the regime’s control.

“The Kaesong park has a degree of South and North Korean civilians mingling at work,” said Cho Bong-hyun, senior fellow at Seoul-based IBK Economic Research Institute. “But the Kumgang tours, to the North’s eyes, are an easy tool to earn hard currency without exposing a number of North Koreans to the outside world.”

Around 53,000 North Koreans from the nearby city of Kaesong were employed at the industrial park until the North pulled out all of its workers earlier this year.

The Kumgang tours started in 1998 as a symbol of inter-Korean peace but were suspended in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean tourist near the resort.

Hyundai Asan, the former exclusive Seoul-based tour operator at Kumgang, said the North formerly charged $30 to $80 per South Korean tourist depending on the length of their stay at the mountain resort. When business peaked in 2007, the North was receiving $20 million a year, the company said.

South Korean tourists were first ferried and later bused in a convoy across the heavily fortified border to the resort, which is sealed off to prevent outside visitors from meeting local North Koreans. Most hotels and other resort facilities were staffed by ethnic Koreans from China or South Koreans hired by Hyundai Asan.

Mr. Cho said that unlike the Kaesong park where tens of thousands of North Korean workers get exposed to South Korea’s better-off managers and advanced factories, the Mt. Kumgang tours carries no risk of exposure of locals to richer Southerners and a subversive message of an alternative political system.

South Korea has yet to respond to the North’s latest suggestion of earlier talks about Mt. Kumgang. It has said previously that such tours will not resume unless the North apologizes for the shooting incident, agrees to a joint probe of the case and promises to prevent the recurrence of the incident.

North Korea seized all South Korean assets at the resort in 2010 and a year later canceled the business license of Hyundai Asan.